Cilla liked his stubbornness, liked the gravity which was so far remote from her earlier knowledge of him. They said good-by in Raindrift Wood, and Gaunt went slowly home, wondering that Cilla and he could meet, not like lovers who had walked the field-ways when spring was warm and urgent, but like friends who were old and tranquil as this month of gold September.
At Marshlands, only Michael had faith in the master’s purpose; the others said that he would tire of farming in a week or two more, because it stood to reason that running water must be gadding off somewhere or another.
Michael’s face grew cheerier as the days went on. He saw the master keeping close at home; he saw the dairy-work grow cleanlier, the maids and the farm-lads doing a day’s work in a day, instead of taking two to it. Michael felt no jealousy. He had always had the farm’s interests at heart, and had known that he could not rule the house until the master set his own back to the work of supervision and ceased from wandering.
Reuben went his own way, as he had always done; but the new way, he admitted to himself, rang more crisply underfoot than the old had done. Folk were anxious in Garth village to show him that they knew and understood what he had done at Ghyll; they were met by an easy courtesy that was cold as an east wind, a courtesy that halted for a moment to talk of the weather, and then passed by without a wish for friendship. Reuben was plainly minded not to dance to their new tune as yet, and they liked him the better for it.
He had found self-confidence. His father’s history, remembrance of that bitter night, when, a lad of fifteen, he had seen Billy and his mother driven out into the wind, had haunted him persistently, had lain always in the background of his thoughts. He had grown used to the belief that his by-name fitted him well enough, that he was infirm of will and must be so to the end. There was no claim upon him, save the farm’s; and that claim had been too abstract and impersonal until now to move his fancy.
“’Twill not last,” he would think, coming home at nightfall from some journey over the pastures. “But at the worst, it can do no harm, and keeps me busy.”
As the days went by, he grew more full of wonder at the change in himself. Little by little the lands, and the smaller of the farms, and his own big house of Marshlands, crept into his heart, as a child might creep to the knee of a lonely man and bring him soft companionship. He had neither wife nor child of his own; and, lacking these, a man’s best solace is love of the acres left him by many generations.
It was no ’prentice hand he turned to farming matters, after all. The routine of it he knew by training; but the instinct toward it lay deeper than one man’s life could ever sound. And the faces of the lazy hinds grew longer day by day, and Michael went whistling about his work.
It was soon after Cilla’s meeting with him in Raindrift Wood that she was caught by Widow Lister, passing down Garth’s highway.
“Oh, good day, Miss Cilla,” she said briskly. “Ye look lile an’ bonnie, if a plain cottage-body might say so without offence. See my bit of a garden here, an’ how the rain has watered it.”